Daily Software Development

One of the agile communities mocking terms of the old-fashioned Waterfall development technique is, “Waterfail”. It is called this, because the community credits this technique with being part of why a lot of projects fail.

The main difference between this technique and most agile techniques, is that waterfall does one big flow of everything. It does not loop through the process as most agile techniques do. It attempts to have everything planned out so that you’re just going through the motions toward success.

I’ve been posting each of the topics from the NimblePros software craftsmanship calendar as we get to the month. With each of these, I am mentioning that you should work on trying to follow the good practice or avoid the anti-pattern. Since this year’s calendar is on anti-patterns, it included Waterfail as something to avoid.

So for the month of August, I am going to recommend trying to move away from Waterfall. I’m not saying that you should suddenly move from a Waterfall project to some form of an Agile project. At least start looking into the possibility. Read a book on agile, go to an agile or software craftsmanship user group, access online resources for learning agile techniques, or attend a conference with an agile track.

I really liked how well this image turned out, and if you didn’t notice, we wrote “Waterfall”, but we cut part of the first “L” to make it appear to say “Waterfail”. Just one of our subtle little tricks in the calendar.